With the Commonwealth Games and European Championships running recently, you may have noticed the posture of the athletes. Elite athletes focus on their posture because their coaches know that properly aligned joints maximise efficiency of movement. If the joints are not aligned, any force acting on them is dissipated and so the muscles cannot generate power effectively. So you can do all the strength training you like for your muscles, but it will be wasted functionally if your posture is not optimal. So posture may be important for elite athletes, but what about the rest of us?

One of the most common postural problems is the head forward posture. Viewed from the side, ideally our ears should be aligned over our shoulders, but for many of us they are in front. Our modern lifestyle encourages it, what with staring at a computer or phone screen for large parts of the day, and driving. When the head sits forward, instead of being balanced over the shoulders and the rest of the body, the muscles in the neck, shoulders and back have to work constantly to hold it there. The resultant pain and discomfort is often referred to as tech neck or text neck.

I find it helpful to think of good posture like pebbles balanced one on top of the other. If they are moved far enough out of alignment, they will fall, unless force is applied to hold them up, like a supporting hand, but that hand will tire eventually because of the effort required. Similarly, if the head is forward, the muscles down the back of the body have to work hard to hold it there, leading to repetitive strain injury.

Head forward posture not only causes muscular pain, it can lead to a vicious cycle of other health problems over time. If the head is forward, it makes it harder to breathe deeply using the diaphragm, so breathing relies more on the muscles of the upper chest and so becomes shallower and suboptimal, which makes chest infections and other breathing problems more likely, which reduces mobility, which reduces cardiovascular fitness, which reduces lower limb strength, which combined with the shift in centre of gravity from the centre of the feet to the front of the feet from the head forward posture leads to trips and falls, which reduces confidence, leading to the use of a stick or frame for support, which creates further imbalance and leads to foot shuffling and further trips and falls…

So, yes, posture does matter because poor posture can lead to:

• respiratory issues

• balance problems

• falls and fractures

• chronic ill health.

I remember my Mum encouraging my sister and me to stand up tall, imagining that we were balancing a book on our head. At the time I thought she was being strict, but now I am grateful to her for that. Working on good posture is preventive healthcare and hopefully you understand now, if you didn’t before, why I bang on about it in class and in the treatment room.

Like a lot of people, I am looking forward to a holiday over the summer: the change of scenery, time with family and time off work. My summer holiday for the past two years in a row has cured the insomnia that I had been struggling with at the time, and within just a few days, which has made me reflect on how I can bring a bit of that holiday spirit into every day so that I don’t get to the point where I need a break to fix a problem, especially as I am a firm believer that prevention is better than cure.

Many of us have experienced post-holiday blues, but what if the end of one holiday was the beginning of another? What if we maintained what we gained from our holiday in everyday life, whether that is relaxation, quality time with friends and family, more time outdoors, more sleep, being more physically active, etc? Okay, we may not be able to take the warmth and sunshine into our winter days, but perhaps we can fully appreciate what that season has to offer us instead.

In my experience, it really is worth looking at ways to tweak the daily, weekly, monthly routines to make them more sustainable at a personal level (even better if it is at an environmental level too!) Small changes really do add up over time. I am a great one for scheduling things in, because if it isn’t in the diary, so often it slips or doesn’t happen at all, whether that is meditation, exercise, meeting up with friends, calling family, etc. Much as I would love to live by the sea and swim in it every day (yes even in the winter), I can schedule at least quarterly trips to the coast and make the most of open water locally in the meantime. What would help you to make the uplifting things part of your routine?

Something that I have been trying out recently is to plan to enjoy an hour every day, with a view to extending that gradually over time until most of every day is filled with enjoyment, no matter what. Looking ahead to today, I had planned to enjoy writing this post, and so I have. It is not just about doing more of what you enjoy doing, important as that is, but also about finding ways to enjoy tasks that are necessary and less appealing. For example, I have recently found a way to enjoy cleaning the house by setting a time limit to each stint so that it doesn’t feel like an endless task and focusing on the positive difference I am making to my home environment, as well as enjoying the sense of satisfaction at a job well done.

I hope that your next holiday will inspire you with ways to bring at least some of it back with you to your everyday life and that what I have written here will inspire you in the meantime. May you enjoy your days and a greater sense of wellbeing…

The environment that we live in is an important factor impacting our health and wellbeing, whether it is the wider environment of our community or in our own home. As our home environment is the one that we have greatest control over, that is a good place to start working on any changes for the better. There are so many ways of doing that from updating soft furnishings to renovation projects, but one of the simplest and most effective is to introduce plants to your living space, so that is what I am going to focus on here. As biophilic interior designer Oliver Heath explains in his book Design a Healthy Home “Houseplants are more than just a trend; multiple studies have shown their positive effects on our wellbeing… Thanks to our evolutionary development, we are hard-wired to feel more comfortable with greenery nearby, and feel a strong association between plants and health.”

As well as promoting a sense of wellbeing and relieving stress, houseplants can help purify the air in our home. Like all plants, they absorb carbon dioxide and release oxygen. Plants such as the peace lily, aloe vera and snake plant are particularly good for bedrooms because they release more oxygen at night than during the day. Houseplants can also filter from the air pollutants, such as benzene and formaldehyde, that are released by everyday household products. As well as the plants mentioned above for bedrooms, some others that are effective at removing chemicals from the air are spider plants, Kentia palms, India rubber plants, dumb canes, cast iron plants (Aspidistra), devils’ ivy and jade trees (also known as money plants). You will need about five per room (or fewer large plants) to make a meaningful difference to the air quality.

If you are sceptical about your ability to keep a plant alive, you could try the almost unkillables such as the appropriately named cast iron plant or a snake plant. A wealth of advice on caring for houseplants is out there for you to tap into. A good place to start are the Royal Horticultural Society’s House Plant Book and their Practical Cactus & Succulent Book. Online plant retailers like Patch Plants and Hortology provide helpful information on choosing and caring for houseplants. Nurturing something is a rewarding experience with its own benefits to health and wellbeing, and you may even learn some new skills to boot!

Houseplants can help you tap into your creativity too by making them part of your interior design. You can mix up where you position them: on the floor, on surfaces or hanging from shelves, walls or ceilings. You can mix up or co-ordinate the shapes, sizes, textures, colours and patterns of the plants, their leaves, flowers and containers. All three of the books mentioned above will give you pointers for this.

I hope that you have found something here to inspire you to use plants to create a healthier and happier environment for yourself and for all those who share your home.

It was Mental Health Awareness Week on the 9th to the 15th of May this year, so that sets the theme for this month’s post. Values are the foundations that we build our lives upon, giving rise to our beliefs, thoughts, feelings and behaviour, so understanding our core values and living authentically to them is key to good mental health and subsequently to physical health too.

A value is something that is important to you to the point that it is linked to an emotional state that you either seek to experience or to avoid. So if one of your values is honoured, you will experience positive emotions and if it is violated, you will experience negative emotions.

Examples of values are: integrity, status, honesty, relationships, wealth, loyalty, adventure, security, health, power, creativity, nature, justice, fun, freedom, discretion, modesty, etc. The same value can mean different things to different people, for example adventure to person A may mean exploring close to home and to person B it may be cycling round the World. When you are living in harmony with your values, you will experience ease of being. Whereas living in a way that conflicts with your values will cause emotional distress, which in the long-term can lead to physical symptoms too, so it is important to address the problem.

Most, if not all, values are learned from parents, wider family, cultural heritage, the education system, work culture, etc. For that reason, some of the values that you have may not be authentic to you and may not be serving you, which is why it is worth reflecting on them. Take a moment now or schedule another time to list your top ten values and consider what each will give you when you honour that value. Are there any in that list that don’t sit so comfortably with you now that you have reflected on them? And where in your life are you dishonouring any of your core values and what could you do to change that?

It can be interesting to review your values regularly, say monthly or annually, to observe any change and to notice which are always in your top ten. Be aware that the priority may change according to what is going on in your life at the time. Have fun exploring your values and I hope that it helps you achieve greater ease of being.

My coaching training has taught me that the quality of our relationships affects our health and wellbeing more than many of us realise. A dysfunctional relationship with a partner, friend, family member or colleague can harm not only our mental health, but our physical health too, so it pays to work on maintaining healthy relationships. A really helpful way to do that is to look at relationships as emotional bank accounts. As with a financial bank account, you can make deposits and withdrawals into an emotional bank account, but with actions instead of money. The deposits are made with affirming actions such as kindness, consideration and honesty. The withdrawals are leaning on the other (metaphorically), being discourteous, forgetting a birthday or anniversary, etc. If you take out more than you put in, you go overdrawn and that’s when you feel as though you are walking through a minefield.

So what can you do to put credits into your joint emotional bank accounts? In his book The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey suggests the following six actions:

1. Understand the other’s needs - see things from their perspective and work out what they would appreciate.
2. Pay attention to the little things, they really do count - it could be taking your significant other tea in bed in the morning, giving your child your full attention, touching base with a friend, hugging an elderly relative or showing gratitude to a colleague.
3. Keep commitments - if you say you are going to do something, do it, otherwise you risk losing the trust of others and withdrawing from the emotional bank account instead of depositing into it.
4. Clarify expectations - don’t leave others to guess what you expect of them and vice versa, talk, be clear and be kind.
5. Show integrity - Stephen Covey describes integrity as “conforming reality to our words - in other words keeping promises and fulfilling expectations. This requires an integrated character, a oneness, primarily with self, but also with life.”
6. Apologise when you make a withdrawal - acknowledge it, apologise sincerely and avoid doing it again if you can. Actions speak louder than words.

Give before you expect to receive. Your own behaviour can set an example to those around you to follow in how they relate to you and to others, so your ripples of influence can spread far and wide. I can highly recommend reading Stephen Covey’s book. It is a classic that still holds true today and can help you reach your potential, not just in your relationships, but in other areas of your life as well.